Historically, consumers generally viewed television programming as it was received live from a broadcast, cable or satellite source. As analog and digital recording devices (e.g., video cassette recorders, as well as digital/personal video recorders) became more prevalent, consumers have been increasingly able to shift their television viewing to more convenient viewing times. Even more recently, the ability to “place shift” television viewing from one location to another has become more widespread. Using the various SLINGBOX products available from Sling Media of Foster City, Calif., for example, consumers are able remotely view television programming or other video signals that are provided by a receiver, media player, recorder or other media source that is physically located at a different place than the viewer. Traditionally, content has been placeshifted primarily from a receiver or recorder over a digital network to a personal computer, wireless phone or other portable device. Viewing placeshifted content on a remotely-located television, however, has traditionally been relatively difficult because most televisions do not have network connectivity or other mechanisms for communicating with remotely-located media sources.
In addition, consumers are showing increased interest in viewing and placeshifting digital content that is produced or received from a digital camera, network server and/or the like. Such content might include consumer-generated content (e.g., home movies or digital clips created by the consumer), as well as any content that has been ripped from a physical media (e.g., a compact disk (CD), digital versatile disk (DVD), and/or the like), or obtained from any free or fee-based online source. Such content may include movies on demand, video clips obtained from an online clipping or file sharing service, or any other content as appropriate. Much of this content is in digital format that is traditionally decoded and viewed on a personal computer or the like. While it would frequently be desirable to view stored digital content on a conventional television, in practice this can be a challenge. Among other issues to be overcome, user-generated or user-stored content files are frequently relatively large in size (e.g., several gigabytes or more), making payback difficult on many devices (such as televisions) that may not have disk-based or other suitable file systems able to accommodate such files.
As a result, it is desirable to create systems, methods and/or devices that are able to present stored media content on a conventional television or similar display. These and other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background section.